The 80th anniversary of the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), being marked one of these
days, is unlikely to draw too much attention. What is being hotly
debated in Ukraine is the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Amy), the OUN’s
armed branch, Roman Shukhevych, who held various posts in the
organization and even headed it, and Stepan Bandera, known as the OUN
top leader. These subjects and personalities have their followers and
adversaries. But the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists itself is
outside the societal discourse. After all, this can have a logical
explanation: the OUN has been a legally unrecognized entity for 80
years now.

“WE WERE BORN IN A GREAT HOUR...”These words open A Tribute to
Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN anthem. While the organization was
still in the making, Col. Yevhen Konovalets emphasized that “we live in
an infinitely great era. It is one of the revolutionary epochs that
span decades and forge a new world and new man. We have this choice in
the great worldwide drama of our time: to be either the creators or the
victims of history”.

At the very outset of their activities,
Ukrainian nationalists really strove to be the creators of history.
Even before the OUN was established at a Vienna congress on Jan. 28—Feb.
3, 1929, the Konovalest-led Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) was
already one of the most active Ukrainian entities. The result of the
two attempts the UVO made in 1920 and 1924 in Lviv on the life of the
Polish political leaders— Marshal Jozef Pilsudski and President
Stanislaw Wojciechowski— was the reason why no Polish leaders ever
visited Lviv openly and officially until the Polish state’s downfall.

In the course of time, OUN activities
assumed such a scale that the Polish newspaper Bunt mlodych wrote in
1933: “The mysterious OUN— Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—
is now stronger than all the Ukrainian legal parties combined. It
dominates young people and is forming public opinion and working at an
unprecedented pace to draw the masses into the whirlpool of
revolution.” This characteristic was no exaggeration—
in the combatant field alone, there was a large number of successful
attempts, including the assassinations of the Soviet consul in Lviv and
the Polish interior minister in Warsaw.

Although political assassinations were
not among the organization’s priorities, they tended to change the
awareness of Ukrainians and Poles. As political “trials of Bandera and
his comrades”, to quote a journalist’s phrase, were underway, the Poles
took a different look at the Ukrainian liberation cause.

“Those people killed, wishing to serve
the cause of their nation. We do not think this was a really good
service. But they are serving it successfully now: three-fourths of the
Polish press, which has eschewed the word ‘Ukrainian’ for 17 years,
have learned this word in the past three weeks and will never forget
it. And those who used to call these people no other than ‘haidamaky,’
are ashamed today of the stupid brand of ‘somber looks’ that they would
put on them” (Wiadomosci literackie, No. 50, Dec.15, 1935).

In addition to these assassination
attempts, there was tremendous propagandist and educational work.
Researchers estimate that only in the first six years of OUN activities
(1929—1934),
1,024 Ukrainians were sentenced to a total 2,020.5 years in prison,
four to capital punishment, and 16 to life imprisonment. This occurred,
incidentally, well before the most high-profile political trials of OUN
leaders.

Yet, as the organization was still in
the making, there were some small details that showed differences in
its activities “in the homeland” (Western Ukraine) and abroad.
Delegates of the 1929 OUN founding congress had a group photograph
taken. The picture shows 27 congress participants, seven of whom
resided in Galicia. Three years later, in September 1932, a trial began
in Lviv, which went down in history as the “trial of congress
delegates”. Sitting in the dock were six people (one of the original
seven had died by that time). On the basis of one photo, the congress
delegates were sentenced to four-year imprisonment each.

An ordinary photo became an “acid test”
for the underground organization. For what was allowed to OUN militants
outside Poland was prohibited and dangerous to “homeland fighters”.

Small wonder that tiny but essential
differences in their activities caused two splits in the organization
in the 1940s.

THE PERIODS OF STATEHOOD AND
STATELESSNESSThe May 1945 Declaration of the OUN
Leadership has some of the lines that more than once characterized the
behavior of nationalists at the time of the geopolitical changes that
swept through Europe for a decade, from the mid-1930s until the
mid-1940s: “There may be days of triumph and decline on a great and
sacred way of the liberation struggle of an enslaved people, and we are
not going to make our actions dependent on a future showdown. As an
active generation of the people, we are discharging our civic duty
irrespective of whether we will be given a wreath of thorns or laurels
for this. We do believe in the strength and resurrection of Ukraine”.

Therefore, in spite of absolutely
unfavorable conditions, OUN militants twice attempted to revive
Ukrainian statehood—
first, when a large number of leaders set out clandestinely to
proclaim, build, and fight for Carpathian Ukraine. Taking into account
that the Czechs surrendered their state without resistance, the action
of Transcarpathian defenders looked like a true exploit. For even today
some historians claim that the March events in Transcarpathia should be
considered the beginning of World War Two. And the Polish newspaper
Merkuriusz Polski printed on its pages something that perhaps not only
Poles thought: “We must say bluntly that after the latest events we are
more respectful of Ukrainians than of Czechs and Slovaks. No matter
what kind of people those ‘Sich men’ may be, they did not moan and did
not lay down their arms but fought in the most difficult political and
strategic conditions”.

Later, on June 30, 1941, the OUN
proclaimed the Act of Ukrainian Statehood Restoration in Lviv. True,
Lithuanians beat Ukrainians in proclaiming their state, but the fact
itself is very eloquent. This again revealed the essence of organized
nationalism: to believe in your own strength only and disregard any
obstacles. After doing a term in a Nazi concentration camp, the
Ukrainian state’s premier Yaroslav Stetsko wrote: “When we were unable
to defend the June 30, 1941 Act with tanks, guns, bombers, and a
sufficiently strong army, for such were the circumstances, we decided
to resist the invaders’ tanks, guns, and bombers by adhering to the
idea of national sovereignty, dignity, and pride of a spiritually
strong nation, by showing our unbreakable character, brave heart, and
fearlessness in personally defending the proclaimed cause. We were
determined not to deny or revoke this under any conditions and to hold
on to the end”.

The June 30 Act also gave rise to the
phenomenon of “OUN mobile groups”, when about 7,000 members of the
organization went to Eastern Ukraine to proclaim statehood, revive
public life, and exercise self-government. This apparently irked the
Nazis but greatly encouraged the Ukrainian population in the Dnipro
River basin, and Ukrainian nationalism found its followers among a wide
circle of intellectuals, such as Ivan Bahriany, Vasyl Barka, Hryhorii
Vashchenko, and many others.

During the war the OUN managed to
organize a high-profile resistance movement, widely known as UPA, and
establish an underground governmental body, the Ukrainian Supreme
Liberation Council (UHVR). The long years of self-denying armed
struggle ended in a defeat, but this was very ample evidence of the
Ukrainian people’s great aspiration to have a state of their own. Word
has it that when Gen. de Gaulle came to know about the Ukrainian armed
struggle, he said: “If I had an army such as the OUN has, the German
jackboot would never have trampled the French soil”. It is difficult to
say whether this was really said but it is beyond a shadow of a doubt
that the Ukrainians created one of the most powerful resistance
movements.

LIVING OUTSIDE UKRAINEWhile the nationalist movement’s
strength was perhaps limited to a few thousand members, the OUN area
commander Ivan Klymiv “the Legend” reported to the leadership at the
beginning of Second World War that there were 20,000 loyal fighters in
Galicia and Volyn.

During and after Second World War, the
resistance movement embraced several hundred thousand people.
Astonishingly, in Soviet prison camps, too, nationalists formed a
clandestine network known as OUN-North, or Trans-Polar OUN Leadership.

The Banderites changed the daily
routine in the mala zona (small camp), as they called prison camps,
while the term velyka zona (great camp) referred to the USSR as a
whole. They organized a number of full-scale uprisings, the most
well-known of which were in Norilsk and Kingir, and put an end to the
mayhem of criminal prisoners. In his book The GULAG Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn speaks respectfully about the role of Ukrainians
in overcoming the criminal havoc: “They did very much for the entire
movement, and it is they who brought things into motion. The Dubov
batch brought us the bacillus of revolt. Young, strong guys, fresh from
the guerrilla’s path, they... looked around, were terrified by this
sleeping slavery, and reached for knives”.

To imagine the strength, authority, and
morale of the Banderites in prison camps, suffice it to read
testimonies of Jewish camp inmates deported from the USSR. Avraam
Shyfrin, Anatoly Radygin, Mikhail Kheifets, Yury Vudka, Idel Kogan, and
some other political prisoners have left emotion-filled testimonies on
the Ukrainian nationalists.

Radygin described a generalized image
of a Banderite: “When a neat, spruce, calm, little-spoken, and
clean-shaven man, wearing a clean shirt, well-shined shoes, and
carefully-ironed prison fatigues, would suddenly appear in a bustling
mass, you could guess almost unmistakably his nationality, party
membership, and the colors under which he had fought...” Those were
people loyal to a radiant idea and the once-taken oath. Many of them
were tortured with starvation and cold no less and even more than the
others, and they had lost so many comrades on the hard and bloody roads
from the Carpathians and Kovel to Karaganda and Mordovia. Their
fanaticism bordered on monastic self-denial. Most of them did not smoke
or take alcoholic drinks when we managed to get hold of the latter”.

Not only the Jews but also the
Europeans, who found themselves in the “small camp” after the war and
came back home en masse after the death of Stalin, left a number of
reminiscences about the nationalists. One of them, the German
journalist Arthur Furmann, wrote in a book of memoirs tersely titled
Banderites!: “I am a Banderite!” Whoever could say so was the bravest
of the brave. To be a Banderite meant to be ‘privileged.’ But you could
not receive this ‘privilege’ as a gift–you had to win it by hard work. In a word,
there was no greater distinction for a Ukrainian than being a
Banderite...

A still less known story than life in
prison camps is the development of Ukrainian life in the diaspora. It
is here that the OUN created altogether different Ukrainian realities—
with numerous civic institutions, from youth educational entities, such
as the Union of Ukrainian Youth (SUM), which has brought up more than
one generation of diaspora figures and is now operating in Ukraine, to
the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), an organization that became
an international representation of the enslaved nations.

Yaroslav Stetsko, the OUN’s
longest-standing leader and head of the ABN for 18 years, was a
personal friend of Chiang Kai-shek and Gen. Fransisco Franco; under his
influence the former commander of NATO’s North Army Group, John
Hackett, wrote the book Third World War, where he modeled a situation
in which nationalists would seize control of the KGB and stage a coup
d’ tat.

UNDERGROUND IN THE UKRAINIAN STATEIn the era of independence, the three OUN
branches— Banderites, Melnykites, and dviikari—
emerged in Ukraine in a different form. For instance, the Melnykites
were legalized as an eponymous civic organization; they also set up a
number of other civic entities and publishing houses. The dviikari are
not represented organizationally, but they have made their own
contribution to the literary life of Ukraine, when they moved here the
editorial office of the journal Suchasnist.

The “revolutionary” OUN faction
(Banderites) are not legally registered in Ukraine. After founding a
number of civic institutions and a publishing house, they created a
legal political force, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, which
managed at a certain point in time get some members, headed by with
Yaroslava Stetsko, elected to the Verkhovna Rada. Symbolically, Ms.
Stetsko twice read out the Oath of a People’s Deputy on behalf of all
the MPs.

Stepan Bandera wrote in 1958, a year
before his tragic death: “To be member of a revolutionary liberation
organization means to fully devote yourself and all your lifetime to
the cause of liberation, fully place yourself at the organization’s
disposal, and be ready every hour to obey any order in spite of
difficulties and dangers”.

For eight decades the OUN was creating
the history of Ukraine in spite of obstacles and the price that had to
be paid, fulfilling the key demand of The Decalogue of a Ukrainian
Nationalist: you shall obtain the Ukrainian state or die in a battle
for it!